He did give an answer, and from that answer I think he probably does know. In short:
it depends.
I know, it sucks that we can't sum up all aspects of a technology in a single paragraph. Computers aren't easy and are still for people who don't mind doing their own homework.
I used to own a backup company and we did a lot of testing, testing both software and the major hardware vendors. Including some $2,000+ raid cards.
Once upon a time there were plusses and minuses.
Software raid is better. Specifically the Linux MD raid, with LVM on top. It's much more flexible / featurefull and doesn't make your data dependent on a specific controller.
Back in the day, hardware raid had the advantage of not using CPU cycles. At full write bandwidth, raid could use up 10% or even 20% (during
Excellent arguments, and for the most part I agree with you.
However, in those rare situations when we're still building actual physical servers instead of deploying cloud-based infrastructure it sometimes does make sense to use hardware RAID, if only because we don't have the chance to use a software-based solution.
In my case this happens when deploying hypervisors. If I'm installing a VMware vSphere cluster on bare metal, the software won't give me any way to set up a software RAID and we have to rely on t
Thanks for pointing that out. I had actually intended to include a footnote mentioning that sometimes decent software raid isn't available, such as with some type 1 hypervisors.
There are also bound to be a few weird situations where hardware is better in some way for some very specific application.
The bigger footnote would probably be that I didn't test Windows software raid. Our solution was based on the Linux stack that I mentioned. I would assume the Windows implementation isn't 100X worse than the Linux, for the actual raid part. Raid is actually pretty darn simple.
How is this on Slashdot? (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't know, why post?
I'm interested as well, and I want to read suggestions from people who have been there.
Re: (Score:0, Flamebait)
He did give an answer, and from that answer I think he probably does know. In short:
it depends.
I know, it sucks that we can't sum up all aspects of a technology in a single paragraph. Computers aren't easy and are still for people who don't mind doing their own homework.
Used to be "it depends". Now software is better (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to own a backup company and we did a lot of testing, testing both software and the major hardware vendors. Including some $2,000+ raid cards.
Once upon a time there were plusses and minuses.
Software raid is better. Specifically the Linux MD raid, with LVM on top. It's much more flexible / featurefull and doesn't make your data dependent on a specific controller.
Back in the day, hardware raid had the advantage of not using CPU cycles. At full write bandwidth, raid could use up 10% or even 20% (during
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent arguments, and for the most part I agree with you.
However, in those rare situations when we're still building actual physical servers instead of deploying cloud-based infrastructure it sometimes does make sense to use hardware RAID, if only because we don't have the chance to use a software-based solution.
In my case this happens when deploying hypervisors. If I'm installing a VMware vSphere cluster on bare metal, the software won't give me any way to set up a software RAID and we have to rely on t
Re:Used to be "it depends". Now software is better (Score:2)
Thanks for pointing that out. I had actually intended to include a footnote mentioning that sometimes decent software raid isn't available, such as with some type 1 hypervisors.
There are also bound to be a few weird situations where hardware is better in some way for some very specific application.
The bigger footnote would probably be that I didn't test Windows software raid. Our solution was based on the Linux stack that I mentioned. I would assume the Windows implementation isn't 100X worse than the Linux, for the actual raid part. Raid is actually pretty darn simple.
Traditionally Softwrare RAID was buggy (Score:2)
Especially on Windows.
You were far more likely to lose data due to software bugs than due to a disk failure.
Hopefully things have got better.